Google+: Too many eggs in the Google basket

As the dust begins to settle on Google’s latest and least-tentative step towards an overarching social infrastructure, it’s becoming overwhelmingly apparent that Google+ is a Good Thing. At its most basic, Google+ is an alternative in a space that is fast becoming a one-party state. With 750 million users, exponential activity growth, the most-proliferated “Like” button, and one of the most popular federated login system in the world (Facebook Connect), it’s fair to say that Facebook’s grip on the web is monopolistic — and Google+ offers us a viable and safe alternative.

With Google+ in the open, and with tech pundits lathering Circles and Hangouts with the highest of honorifics, Facebook finally needs to watch its step — and its back. Except for Microsoft, which already owns a share in Facebook, Google is the only web property which can even begin to threaten Facebook’s supremacy. Facebook has had a far from faultless infancy, but because of its complete dominion of the web, the repercussions from its numerous faux pas have been almost nonexistent. That’s the problem with monopolies, and the reason they’re illegal: if you have nowhere to go — if there isn’t an alternative service that you can switch to — the monopoly can simply milk you and stretch you without recourse. But now there’s Google+. With Big G hulking menacingly in Facebook’s shadow and just waiting for a misstep or mistake, Facebook needs to be careful. Mess up now, Zuckerberg, and Google will gladly gobble up droves of discontented denizens.

The problem with this rationale, however rosy it may seem, is that you’re simply moving from one internet juggernaut to another. You’re taking your chips from Facebook and investing them in Google+. This might be a satisfactory solution in the short term, but do you have any rational reason to believe that it’s better in the long term? Is Google a nicer company than Facebook? Google’s record with privacy-related issues (Buzz, Street View, Wi-Fi snooping) is just as bad as Facebook’s, if not worse, and it remains under investigation by governments around the world. Google+ certainly shows that Google has learnt from its mistakes — but just remember that Google makes its money by selling you; by knowing where you live, what videos you like watching, and your entire search and surfing history, Google sells targeted advertising to the tune of tens of billions of dollars per year. Selling you is 96% of Google’s revenue stream.

Six of one…

By moving to Google+, you are simply switching pimps from Facebook to Google — and when you stop to think about it, that might not be a very good idea. Let me show you a sad story from last week, where Google made 10-year-old Alex cry by banning him from Gmail. In short, Alex got invited to Google+ — and to join Google+ you must create a Google Profile. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) Alex gave his real age — and voila, the next time he tried to log into Gmail, his account had been blocked for breaking Google’s terms of service. Google, by law, and just like almost every website in the US, cannot easily offer its services to people under the age of 13.

Now, this isn’t necessarily wrong of Google — it’s just following the law, after all — but it perfectly illustrates a far larger and more pressing issue: Alex lost his Gmail account, his contacts list, and every email he’s ever sent or received, because he updated his Google Profile. These are two services that are only tenuously linked by the Google Taskbar, yet inexorably linked by the Google umbrella. Your entire Google account — the name and password that logs you into as disparate services as YouTube, Docs, Picasa, and Google+ — is governed by a master terms of service, and by additional terms defined by each individual service. If you break the master ToS on YouTube, you can lose access to Picasa; if you do something silly in Google+, you can lose access to your Docs.

Half dozen of the other…

Hopefully you’re beginning to see the problem of putting all of your eggs in the Google basket. It gets worse though, I’m afraid: the Google+ user content and conduct policy is dangerously restrictive. First of all, it leads with an incredibly vague policy about illegal activities: “Do not use our products to engage in illegal activities or promote dangerous and illegal acts.” What does Google consider illegal? Are links to The Pirate Bay illegal — or just direct links to torrents? What if I have friends that live in an embargoed country, and I link to a piece of software that US law prohibits them from downloading? Which government’s definition of “illegal” are we using, anyway?

It goes on: if you post any nudity or sexually explicit content on Google+, or even set your profile picture to a “close-up of a person’s buttocks”, your Google account can be suspended. Furthermore, as Violet Blue (NSFW) points out, Google+ uses Picasa for its photo albums — and Picasa has a zero tolerance policy for nudity and borderline content. In other words, you might want to think twice before posting photos of your salacious barroom and clubbing antics on Google+. Unlike Flickr, which allows nudity but requires you to label your uploads as “mature” to prevent accidental viewing, Google+ and Picasa lack any kind of user-administered controls — you either keep your content clean, or host your images elsewhere.

Like the 13-year-old thing, this is still fairly sensible stuff from Google — but how long will it be until some unfortunate Facebook convert trips over the barbed wire and posts a drunken photo of his mooning buttocks? Or perhaps a link to an art exhibition featuring a nude sculpture or painting? He will swiftly find himself without access to his email, documents, videos, blogs, and more. Google is notoriously bad at handling terms of service violations, too — there’s no telephone number that you can call to contest your suspension, and email support usually takes days, usually resulting in a succinct but useless boilerplate response.

All of your eggs in one basket

Now, think about it: do you really want to get all of your Google services mixed up with your social network? There’s the inherent privacy concerns, of course — and a successful social network is the only thing missing from Google’s targeted advertising crown — but ultimately, it’s a matter of whether you want to bequeath your entire internet experience to Google. If you think that Facebook has a monopoly in the social scene, just imagine for a second what your life on the web would be like if you switched to Google+: You would open your browser — Chrome — and search using Google. You would share content and keep up with friends using Google+ Circles and +1. You would consume and create content on YouTube and Picasa and Blogger. You would talk to your friends with Voice and Google+ Hangouts. You would plan your trips using Maps and Earth and Docs — and of course, Gmail would be there, underpinning it all. Every single step of the way you will be followed by tracking cookies and behavior monitors and targeted advertising.

Effectively, it will be AOL 3.0 all over again. You might be using a normal web browser this time, and it might look like you’re free to roam across the beautiful, bountiful expanses of the internet, but ultimately you’ll be playing in Google’s walled garden. You can step outside for brief periods, of course — Google doesn’t know everything, at least not yet — but never without Google’s knowledge, and never beyond the tenacious, tentacular reaches of Big G’s tracking cookies.

Before you jump ship to Google+, remember this: Facebook might not be perfect, but at least you can sign out. Do you really want to log in and then spend an eternity in the World Wide Google Web?

Tagged In

I think, to be honest, that comparing Facebook’s privacy mishaps with Google’s is like comparing World War 1 to the Battle of Hastings… its a different order of magnitude entirely. Furthermore, with Google+ you have the choice at any time to download everything in your profile without jumping through hoops, unlike with Facebook. All your eggs may be in one basket regardless, but with Google’s basket you have the choice to move them out.

http://www.mrseb.co.uk Sebastian Anthony

Yes — very good point, re: taking your data. I actually meant to link to a previous story I’ve written on that topic. I’ll put that link in — thanks.

The Buzz debacle was pretty huge! As was the whole Wi-Fi snooping thing.

Anonymous

They were huge, but look at what happened:

-wifi snooping. First this was only with unencrypted networks, it was a line of code that wasn’t supposed to be there, and the data wasn’t used (or intended to be used). They had third party privacy companies verify this, and now have their data collection practices audited. When governments demanded they turn over the data, they refused. They’re also strong advocates of Digital due process, and one of the few data companies in the world that publishes a transparency report when governments request they hand over data.

The Buzz issue was kinda a big deal, but it wasn’t them trying to do anything ‘malicious” either. They basically made it so you auto-followed your most commonly contacted gmail users. Should this have been done? No. Is this the same thing as Facebook resetting your privacy policy every few months so that more data is opened to the public? Hell no.

Brett Jones

Honestly how bad is Wi-Fi snooping? It’s like leaving your front door open when you leave your home; if you’re dumb enough to do it then you’re dumb enough to get robbed. Correct me if I’m wrong but I believe they were simply reading unimportant data for mapping purposes and I honestly have no issue with that. If they were reading traffic, that would be a different story. I’d also like to add that you do not need a Google account to have a Google+ account. You can create an account with any email address. Gmail is not required. So you can also “sign out” of Google+ as easy as you can Facebook.

http://www.mrseb.co.uk Sebastian Anthony

Well, I guess it comes down to what you consider to be more heinous — Facebook’s awful history with obfuscated privacy controls, or Google’s misdemeanors. I think everyone will feel differently about which is worse.

You can use Google+ without a Gmail account — but it’s still a Google account.

With regards to signing out, I was speaking figuratively — yes, you can log out… but if you want your customized and perfectly-tailored search results, video suggestions, and so on… you need to stay signed in :)

Brett Jones

I was speaking figuratively as well :)

I love the direction Google is going with their products. Matched with their competitors, they generally have the better option. I say generally because, like anything else, you’re not going to win every battle. I personally use Boxee as opposed to GoogleTV because it has the features I want. If GoogleTV would stream videos with no codec issues I would jump on board but for now, my Boxee Box (priced at $185) does the job better.

Honestly when I use any product that doesn’t support Google SSO I get a little irritated. I’d rather not have a different login for every website I visit. Especially the ones that I’ve never used before and I just found a link in my sparkle (Google+) and wanted to leave a comment (hint hint).

I think you make some great points but my opinion is that Google will make it out better because they offer options that users want and Facebook does not have. In face, I’ve already moved almost 50 of my Facebook friends over to Google+ and I plan on deactivating (because it’s nearly impossible to delete) my Facebook account.

http://www.mrseb.co.uk Sebastian Anthony

I’m a huge fan of Google services too! I’ve always been very leery of Facebook and Google, though — they’re both getting too big, and they’re both becoming too indispensable. OPTIONS are so important — but trying to choose between Facebook and Google is a really tough choice to make, IMO.

Thanks for the offer, but I’m on Google+ — I just haven’t updated my website. I’ll do that now :)

Brett Jones

I think I may have used Facebook connect once or twice but it was most likely because they didn’t support Google SSO.

I figured you already had an account I was mostly just being facetious ;)

http://www.mrseb.co.uk Sebastian Anthony

Tsk, and I was conducting myself with complete sincerity and admirable aplomb… for shame!

http://www.projectit.com Anonymous

Before Facebook will start to take members privacy seriously, FIRST, you have to get their attention. Google is the only company with the clout to do that. Competition is good and if G+can put a chink in the Facebook armor, more power to them.

http://appleguytom.blogspot.com Thomas Ross (aka AppleTom)

I’d like an invite, if you can spare one.
[@gmail]

dsf89o32o

Why would you want that (last para)? I want to have access to info around the world, not to just what I know of currently…

David Spake

Comparing Google and Facebook and bashing Google as bad as Facebook is too easy. Google has had it’s faults, but it’s nowhere near as bad as Facebook as far as privacy issues go. IMHO, Facebook could care less about privacy, and see’s it as an impediment to them making money. The truth in this lies in they way they make their users jump through byzantine and confusing privacy pages. At least with Google, and it’s 100 tentacle arms, it goes through the motions of allowing you to remove your data. Take email: a user can can pull their email out of gmail whenever they wish. Google has also pushed OpenSocial, allow you to back out of website tracking, provides clear privacy polices, and has mouthed the ability to pull all yoru data out of Google+ if you wish
The arrogance of Facebook is enough to cause my stomach to turn, and if nothing else, Google+ should case Facebook to reconsider some of their stupid decisions regarding privacy and ownership of data.

http://twitter.com/westcoastdroid Matt Schiffer

I think all of the complaints about Facebook policies have finally caught up with the company. Respecting your privacy is not about allowing users to create private groups or circles. It’s about respect. When you sign up to a service offered by a company and accept its terms and conditions, you expect that company to respect those terms and conditions. If they don’t, it’s natural that people are going to be pissed off.

I noticed this with people who have looked at and reviewed Google+. They all make a comment about how the privacy settings are better or easier to access or less intrusive. This small factor is almost always mentioned, including in this video:

I like having everything synced and working together. My Android phone uses all my Google apps, and I don’t have to worry about importing/exported any form of data between the two, which is what I love most.

As for the comment about losing access to all your services by violating TOS on one, I dont think that would happen. Each of the services has their own agreement. In the case with the 10 year old, he violated all the services with one action. Sucks for him, but most people who have problems with the privacy are the ones that are doing things illegally in the first place.

Anonymous

nice article.. though it doesn’t make sense..
if their products are awesome then there is no point leaving them for other.. in the end they are all the same(cookies etc)

Anonymous

Facebook’s privacy “flubs” were almost all intentional. The Three Google flubs you listed? ONE of them was intentional (street view) and that was a misunderstanding more than anything else. Google actually has a much BETTER track record with privacy than Facebook does, and on top of that, Google will let you take all your data with you (and delete it from their systems) rather easily.

http://pulse.yahoo.com/_AN5G5SBLVLYHGGMF56N7LPUUFE Aaron

Sebastian,

Maybe you noticed all of Facebook’s changes to their privacy rules over the past 2 years. They’re far worse than Google, not to mention how they handle copyright and ownership of your data. Take a look at what happens when you upload a photo to FB and G+.

http://twitter.com/vityokr vic

Stopped reading at ‘google maps / wifi blah-blah’

Jack Hodges

stopped reading at ‘poor little Alex’.

http://twitter.com/gctaylor Greg Taylor

This seems like mostly FUD. Where do you keep your tinfoil hat?

http://twitter.com/Merennulli Merennulli

While this goes a little off the deep end (since the premise seems to presuppose people need the right to break laws and violate policy), it does bring up some good points. I use my personal Gmail account to access docs for groups I join and work with. Getting locked out for an obscure or perceived policy violation would be a serious problem. And it DOES happen. I’ve been locked out before, along with thousands of others, because I used Firefox on a day after they updated Gmail in a way that broke on Firefox temporarily, causing it to refresh repeatedly in the background and look like a brute force login attempt.

The thing to take away from this is that G+ is tied to everything else, so you can’t treat it as casually as you might Facebook. I suspect the reality is that it will become a competitor more to LinkedIn than Facebook, as only relatively professional behavior will be tolerated with any consistency.

http://twitter.com/taracoomans Tara D.Coomans

You make some good points. Perhaps the question should really be, when will we really understand what we are giving up by choosing to communicate (and research, and postulate) in a convenient and free platform. Is anything really “free”?
For a long time, I’ve questioned whether FB is really a social network or an advertising medium. After all, there is very little customer service outlets on FB, but if you are an advertiser, you may (or may not) get to speak with an actual person.
With G+, you have to ask if its a social network or a dominant integration tool to encourage use of the many, many Google products..some of which some people have never even heard of before G+.

Regardless, our world has changed and there are some of us who can’t even imagine living in a world where email is the 3rd or 4th communication outlet checked in the morning. And like you, I’m glad that someone is challenging FB’s dominance, I think its healthy for the space and healthy for users.

http://dannyboyt.myopenid.com/ Dan

While the Google bashing is a bit over-the-top, I do agree that serious problems with the eggs-in-one-basket approach. I always try to diversify (sometimes unsuccessfully) my cloud service usage and make it a point not to rely on a single provider, whether it’s Google, MS, or Yahoo. It scares me that if I mistakenly upload racy pics in Picasa that I would lose access to my email, blog, and rss reader.

Fortunately I don’t use Facebook and I have no intention of using Google+.

http://ionrock.org Eric Larson

I totally agree with this post and yet I’m curious what the alternative is? No one has really created some open source system that you can easily pick up and move around from provider to provider that has the same level of integration. Do we wait for the next service to come along (yet another walled garden) or some open source project to gain steam (remember Mugshot? – http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2006/05/6955.ars)? I’m not even suggesting that it is necessary to have a “social network” but it seems apparent that the web has introduced a new landscape where people would like to stake claim to a place to call their own. The folks with the experience can get a domain name and build a website, but the integration isn’t there. Google and Facebook have invested in the infrastructure, so it is understandable that we accept their taxes if we use the roads they have built. That said, instead of actual roads, all they really do is throw around 1s and 0s, which is a lot cheaper than plowing through thousands of miles of frontier on the backs of immigrants.

I’m not trying to be pro or con here either. I like Google+ so far. For whatever reason, it is sitting better with me than Facebook. That said, I’ve never really stuck with any social network in a meaningful fashion. Things like Twitter have loosely stuck with me b/c it is publishing, but things like check ins and sharing have never been a priority. Maybe the real future is a world where people realize that social networks are only as valuable as the real life relationships they actually foster. Then we’ll see cool software that help communicate our feelings to loved ones… Just like Print Shop did.

This article taught me that I should go elsewhere if I feel the need to be ten years old and nude on the internet, thank you for enlightening me! I’d have never known otherwise.

Yes, let’s not adopt a cross-platform standard login for multiple services, even though half the people reading and commenting on this article are probably using OAuth to log in and have used it for years prior to this errant thought on its way out to pasture. Let’s all heed these reasonable warnings and return to 1999, where we have to fill out our name, address, email, ICQ number and the “Are you not a robot?” checkbox on every single web service we could and would ever sign up for. If you aren’t sensible/mature/old enough to not do something so catastrophically stupid that you get your primary Google account binned, maybe this service isn’t for you; because this is a service, not an entitlement. Services are not for everybody.

Jack Hodges

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order isRapidly fadin’
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’.

http://twitter.com/evilrooster Abi Sutherland

but how long will it be until some unfortunate Facebook convert trips over the barbed wire and posts a drunken photo of his mooning buttocks? Or perhaps a link to an art exhibition featuring a nude sculpture or painting?

Or someone posts a photo of a woman breastfeeding? That actually happened on Livejournal.

Jo Murphy

And on Facebook – breastfeeding photos considered ‘offensive’ and banned :(

Google is following some the same thoroughly immoral policies as Facebook. Censorship can only be justified by facts, not prejudice, no matter how popular those prejudices may appear to some puritans in the USA. The teenage pregnancy rate in the USA is ten times that in Denmark or many other European countries. Don’t these people ever stop to think and wonder why? Abortion, promiscuity, condom use, sexually transmitted infections, contraception, age at becoming sexually active, breast feeding etc etc. Every body image and body knowledge related indicator that we have looked at is the same. More prudish countries have worse outcomes, often by a factor of ten or more. How many children and young people must die before the prudes start thinking about the consequences of their actions?

Richard Johnson

Bashing Google+ for doing first what Facebook is racing to accomplish is ridiculous. You can sign out of Facebook but you can sign out of Google+, too. (Yep, just tried it.) My point is that Facebook would love to have all the built-in services that Google+ is offering. Bashing G+ for getting there first is wrong. Maybe an article focused just on the importance of fighting for out individual rights amid the social giants would be more in order.

http://pulse.yahoo.com/_SYRQ3534WPN7YHS5KMUW2JOBKU J

It’s funny how nobody seems to remember that Facebook is totally opt-in. When you create an account, there is nothing in it. Every piece of data in Facebook has to be intentionally added by the user. Compare that with G+, if you enable it from an existing account. All your data, including email, docs, and pics, is now considered information you want to share. Can you really be certain Google won’t accidentally share your confidential docs (which you shouldn’t have in the cloud anyway) with everybody you know? Why does G+ force you to link your Picasa web albums, and then automatically allow others to share them? I have multiple email accounts, including one that exists solely for using Facebook. If G+ opens up before somebody sends me an invite, I will probably create a new account just to use it and limit the data I enter, just like with Facebook.

http://twitter.com/stratosathens Stratos Safioleas

Great article. Thanks.

http://twitter.com/stratosathens Stratos Safioleas

Great article about the implications of using these two networks that most users forget. MUST read.

http://pulse.yahoo.com/_ZACXMHIH55AIIKN5HRSUGL7QUI oceanida

so, bottom line, for us who don’t want to show off our buttocks to the world or are over 13 it’s fine, plus we can have everything synced.

http://twitter.com/alexanderchalk Alexander Chalkidis

Somebody visited my website (http://bit.ly/plpxDu ) and then commented “wow! you really have a thing against Google!” I was surprised. I never intentionally “had a thing”, it is just that I am in the business of information and Google is the scariest monopoly invented in the history of homo sapiens. Making Google look like the weak second of the internet world is preposterous. Google controls search, ie what we discover about the world. Even without a Google account, they decide what you learn every day!

http://www.AskDrJohn.com John Lundin, PhD

Excellent thoughts Sebastian… Let me suggest two alternative perspectives:
1- Some giants work hard to maintain their small, nimble feel toward products. 3M immediately comes to mind. They work hard to be innovative, creative, quick to market with products/services in their domains. I believe that Google is much the same way.
2- Google, even with their failures, is coalescing around a much better human model of computer mediated life… Just this week, I was working on how I should send out a blog about ‘how to fix the economy’… http://jhlundin.wordpress.com/2011/07/06/here-is-how-to-fix-our-sluggish-economy/
I sure don’t want to bore all my Twitter or Facebook friends (unless they have insomnia), but G+ Circles enable me to segment my contacts into a group that would like the intellectual stimulation of an economic discussion…

Thanks for the perspective, J

http://twitter.com/AdjaanICT Adjaan ICT Diensten

One of my strongest arguments againts cloud processing is displayed here in Sebastian’s article with his example of the violation of the ToC. Putting information on the internet may cause for various reasons, and this is one of the many, loss of data. So my suggestion:

DO NOT BELIEVE IN CLOUD PROCESSING, IT MAY HARM YOUR DATA’s HEALTH

http://pulse.yahoo.com/_CPPAOLOEQKRXT2SI7R2UDGK5CI Al

2 simple solutions to this issue:

1) Assume your privacy will be violated.

2) Back up your data.

Luckily, google gives us a way to get our data out of nearly every service it provides, as well as the ability to import that data into a newly created account. By using this feature– perhaps once or twice a month– users should greatly decrease the risk of losing their emails/contacts/reader subscriptions/iGoogle layout etc… to a TOS violation. It may even make sense to essentially “mirror” your Google account between two separate accounts. The likelihood of both accounts being suspended simultaneously is very low.

Beyond that, simply do not post up information that you prefer to remain private. Even with all the privacy features in the world, an internet account is vulnerable to hacking, glitches, maliciousness and subpoenas. The only way to truly protect your privacy is not to put it in the hands of someone else.

http://www.icbs-peclub.com/ Andrew Shannon

Agree with the “all eggs in one basket” argument with Google+… until FB introduces a competitive email client and ramps up its internal search service… which I envision will be in the near future.

http://profiles.google.com/janniklindquist Jannik Lindquist

Google is not selling information about their users. They companies that buys targeted ads from Google are not getting a list of users that live up to certain criteria – as you deliberately make it sound. What Google is selling is targeted ads – and that’s a completely different and much more boring story – as you very well know. Company x buys ads directed at demographic group z – but of course that doesn’t mean that company x will ever get to know anything about any specific user. Please stop the fud

http://profiles.google.com/janniklindquist Jannik Lindquist

Google is not selling information about their users. They companies that buys targeted ads from Google are not getting a list of users that live up to certain criteria – as you deliberately make it sound. What Google is selling is targeted ads – and that’s a completely different and much more boring story – as you very well know. Company x buys ads directed at demographic group z – but of course that doesn’t mean that company x will ever get to know anything about any specific user. Please stop the fud

http://profiles.google.com/janniklindquist Jannik Lindquist

Google is not selling information about their users. The companies that buys targeted ads from Google are not getting a list of users that live up to certain criteria – as you deliberately make it sound. What Google is selling is targeted ads – and that’s a completely different and much more boring story – as you very well know. Company x buys ads directed at demographic group z – but of course that doesn’t mean that company x will ever get to know anything about any specific user. Please stop the fud

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